The Spirit is GREAT. But the spirit in life is invisible. It is also
invincible. India is a land of spirituality. The SPIRIT is there
everywhere, pervading all aspects of life. We do not see it with our
naked eyes. A link, a live link between the deep-seated spirit down
below and the realities of work at the office, kitchen, factory and
field must be found. Our culture has supplied us with copious details of
it. Even the smuggler takes his taxi of wares to the temple and prays
for protection from the police. Who does not believe in GOD when the
crisis crops up in his life?

The reality is India is poor. How can a spiritual nation be poor? It is
a contradiction in terms. Can you be a millionaire and starve? It is
much more impossible for a spiritual person to be poor. In the eighties
some of us tried to apply Spirit to business and made out a logical
version of it. Peter Drucker saw it and commended it as a piece of
wisdom. We were looking for our first trial, a trial of strength with
Life and its harsh realities. A certain businessman was awarded the
title ''Businessman of the Year''. We knew this recognition makes
everyone expect high standards from him. There begins his trouble. He
agreed for us to experiment our ideas in his company and added, ''Forty
new entrants are licensed this year in my field, some of them
international giants. I do not know whether I will be around next
year.'' Just then, we could not tell him it was a rare opportunity that
would raise him sky high.

We translated Spirituality into values of the work place: exhausting our
potential, paying the greatest attention, using the available
technologies to exhaustion, avoiding and eliminating unavoidable waste
by appropriate systems, saving every minute of Time that could be saved,
etc. Based on this, we wrote 122 recommendations that are intelligible
to hard businessmen, practical managers, exhausted supervisors and
intransigent labour. The company's profits doubled that year. It
continued to grow in size and profits. At the end of ten years, the
company was ten times in size, making tenfold profits. What the company
did or did not do, we do not know. With forty new entrants, the market
expanded ten-fold and every one of the forty entrants grew in size.
Competition is a spur to growth. No one likes to develop the competitor,
but the market does when she wants to shower super grace on you in spite
of yourself.